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S9 E2: Martín Carcasson: Do moderates need to be more intolerant?
5 Plays10 months ago
Martín Carcasson is a Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University, where he is also the Director of the CSU Center for Public Deliberation. His research focuses on helping communities work through “wicked” problems through better communication, community problem solving, and collaborative decision-making. He is well known for designing and facilitating public dialogs throughout Colorado, on some of our toughest issues. In our conversation, Martín helps me talk through a question I have been struggling with: Do moderates need to be more intolerant?
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome back to the Free Mind podcast, where we explore topics in Western history, politics, philosophy, literature, and current events with a laser focus on seeking the truth and an adventurous disregard for ideological and academic fashions. I'm Matt Burgess.
Guest Introduction: Martine Carcassonne
00:00:29
Speaker
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, and Faculty Fellow of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. My guest today is Martine Carcassonne. Martine Carcassonne is a Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University, where he is also the Director of the CSU Center for Public Deliberation. His research focuses on helping communities work through wicked problems.
00:00:56
Speaker
for better communication, community problem solving, and collaborative decision making. He is well known for designing and facilitating public dialogues throughout Colorado on some of our most difficult issues.
Should Moderates Be More Intolerant?
00:01:09
Speaker
In our conversation, Martine helps me talk through a question I have been struggling with, and that is, do moderates need to be more intolerant? Martine Carcassan, welcome to the Free Mind podcast. Oh, thanks for having me. This episode's gonna be a little bit different from most of the ones I do.
00:01:27
Speaker
I've been looking to do an episode with somebody who can help me talk through an idea that I've been wrestling with regarding how to reduce political polarization. And the idea is, do moderates need to be more intolerant? And I wanted to do this with you for three reasons. One, you're someone I respect. Two, you're an expert in deliberative dialogue.
00:01:53
Speaker
And three, you mentioned in a conversation we had recently, your own wrestling with something that I think is maybe related to the question I'm
Understanding Wicked Problems
00:02:01
Speaker
wrestling with. And that's the distinction between what you called moral clarity and what you called intellectual humility. So maybe to start, can you tell me what you mean by that?
00:02:11
Speaker
Yeah, and I'll back up a second to set some context because a lot of the work that I do is to look at the world through this lens of wicked problems. The short version of that is when I'm trying to help with an issue, looking at a problem, I try to really figure out what are all the aligning values, what are the different sides care about, identify those values, put them on the table, and then really dig in and look at the tensions between them.
00:02:37
Speaker
So a lot of my work, I've retrained my brain to look for tensions, whereas the social psychology and brain sciences were often wired to avoid those tensions. We want simple, we want to see the world through a good versus evil lens. So we get problems, a lot of issues have lots of underlining values, and then sometimes my work ends out focusing on two particular values, both positive, they're values, but that there's an inherent tension
Balancing Intellectual Humility and Moral Clarity
00:03:03
Speaker
between them.
00:03:03
Speaker
Maybe not a zero sum, but they just kind of don't fit, right? So I use polarity management, it's Barry Johnson's work as kind of an additional tool to really, when you have two that you want to dig into, I've done this with lots of different issues. So that's where I'm starting to play with this moral clarity versus intellectual humility, particularly with some of the Gaza protests and so forth to try to figure out kind of the different sides and how to talk about this.
00:03:27
Speaker
Generally, like you, I imagine, I'm a pretty big advocate for intellectual humility. We need more intellectual humility. That's part of my way to push back on our wiring. We want certainty. We want clarity. To push back on that, how do we develop more of a habit of intellectual humility?
00:03:47
Speaker
But if you look at that as a clarity to manage, it's not that intellectual humility is always better than moral clarity. It's that we need to have some kind of balance between those. And with Barry Johnson's work, I kind of see it also as kind of an Aristotelian kind of virtue. It's the ideal mean between extremes. So when you look at something like moral clarity and intellectual humility,
00:04:11
Speaker
The clarity management has these two by two boxes, right? So on the top is, if we focus on that value and it just goes beautifully, like best case scenario, what are all the things it connects to, right? But then the reality just as Aristotle taught us, like we can go too far, right? We can overemphasize intellectual humility or we can overemphasize moral clarity. And that's where it gets some problems. So what I'm trying to do is to kind of push people in the middle, but not just this milk toast middle that says, oh, we need balance, right?
00:04:41
Speaker
It's a much more nuanced one of what kind of balance and are we out of balance right now so when I'm arguing for more intellectual humility I'm saying hey we need to work to focus on the moral clarity side we need to shift intellectual humility but I also kind of recognize and this might get into the.
00:04:58
Speaker
should moderates be more intolerant, that we can overemphasize that. We can have so much intellectual humility that we can't make important distinctions that we need to make, that we lose the importance of judgment and making some claims, whether that's to reality or value claims that have some substance to it.
00:05:19
Speaker
So it's kind of setting this framework of we're constantly in universities and particularly I think should be an important resources to help us negotiate this tough tension between moral clarity and intellectual ability that we're never gonna resolve, right? Because different situations call for a different balance between those.
00:05:38
Speaker
And just a quick plug, you have a paper, I think, on how universities can do that better, don't you? Yeah, I do have a chapter in a book that talks about kind of this concept of the Wicked Problems University. It kind of lays out in a sense of, you know, a lot of my work is more with communities. I work a lot with like city managers and so forth on how to build capacity. And one of the biggest kind of insights from my work for 20 years is
00:06:02
Speaker
You know communities need these bridging institutions.
Universities as Conveners for Dialogue
00:06:05
Speaker
They need these kind of trusted conveners someone whose responsibility and facilitators right someone whose responsibility is to help people have these tough conversations we need to have that unfortunately both our brains aren't wired to have naturally and There's a lot of you know pad faith actors and conflict entrepreneurs that are trying to take advantage of that, right? Yeah so work with community foundations libraries different kind of civic groups, but also universities and
00:06:31
Speaker
you know, can they fill this role of bridging organizations that reframe issues into more of, you know, as a wicked problem, identifying these tensions and helping people kind of negotiate these tensions more productively. So I wonder if your moral clarity versus intellectual humility distinction
00:06:51
Speaker
blends together the moral and intellectual domains in a way where they might be better separate. So to talk about intellectual clarity versus intellectual humility and moral clarity versus moral humility. Let's come back to that because I think it'll be helpful to first have a preamble of what I've been struggling with. Here's basically how I would lay it out. There are people whom I admire greatly like Monica Cusman from Braver Angels and Ibu Patel from Interfaith America as two examples.
00:07:19
Speaker
People who help groups of people have better conversations, empathize with each other, find common ground, et cetera. It's really important work. It's the kind of thing, the area that I think you and I both started in in polarization in terms of the dialogue work that you do at CSU and the dialogue work that I do at CU.
00:07:41
Speaker
And there's some areas where you can really see how that helps reduce polarization. So for example, there's a huge amount of agreement among Americans on a wide swath of issues, much more than we realize, even on some of the issues that we think are absolutely most divisive. So just as one example, huge majority of Americans want more border security, more merit-based immigration, but also permanent status for the DACA recipients, for the Dreamers.
00:08:07
Speaker
And there's other examples, basically on any divisive issue you can name, you can come up with actually pretty easily a two-thirds majority policy. My student and I did an op-ed on this a couple of years ago. There are also a lot of disagreements that have to do with people having different priority rankings among values that they share. And understanding that they're disagreeing about priority rankings rather than values might help us disagree without distressing or disliking each other.
00:08:34
Speaker
So those are both areas where I think approaches, you know, dialogic approaches, approaches that are all about empathy and understanding are really important and can lower the temperature among huge swaths of the country in tangible ways. So I'm going to keep doing the work that I'm doing. I hope that you do too. And good on people like Monica Guzman and Ibu Patel. But on the other hand,
00:08:58
Speaker
Does anybody actually think that polarization will get solved by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elon Omar singing Kumbaya? I personally don't. Number one. Number two, isn't part of the problem with polarization that the extreme fringes on both sides too often dominate the conversation and then feed off each other?
00:09:18
Speaker
Number three, aren't everyday people in what you might call the moderate majority sometimes pushed to take extreme positions either out of fear of retribution from the extremists on their side if they don't through things like purity tests?
Moderates Facing Retribution and Purity Tests
00:09:33
Speaker
So for example, there was a New York Times article today about how students in elite colleges are being ostracized by their friends if they think they're Zionist, right? That would be an example of a purity test.
00:09:46
Speaker
Or they take extreme positions because they're afraid of the other side extreme, and they're worried that if they allow their side to seem divided, then the other side's extreme might win, right? This is the side of the debate. Jonathan Cheat recently had an article called something like, yes, it's okay to punch left, where he was pushing back on the argument among the farther left that moderate liberals shouldn't criticize them too much because then they are divided and then Trump wins.
00:10:17
Speaker
And then the thing that I think really crystallized this bug in my brain is a modeling study. And you should all be cautious. I do modeling studies, but you should all be cautious about them, right? All models are wrong. Some are useful. So I'm not saying this modeling study is perfectly predictive.
00:10:35
Speaker
But it had this interesting result, which was that one way to reduce polarization is for moderates to be more intolerant. If people who are trying to decide whether to be extreme or moderate are a little bit more afraid of the moderates than they are now, then maybe that would help bring more people to the center. So that's one thing.
Misuse of Moral Goals by Political Fringes
00:10:56
Speaker
Also, and this gets, I think, directly at this intellectual, moral, humility, clarity thing,
00:11:02
Speaker
If we take moral clarity seriously on the issues that people in the political fringes on both sides like to wrap themselves in, so American greatness, patriotism, for example, on the right, social justice, helping the most disadvantaged communities among us on the left, if we take those goals seriously, and for the record, I take both of those goals seriously, do we not owe it to ourselves and to those goals?
00:11:31
Speaker
to not let people wrap themselves in the moral cloth of those goals when they're being transparently destructive, often in a self-serving way to those goals. So do moderates on the right, for example, not have a duty to say, no, you don't get to wrap yourself in the American flag and then storm the Capitol and deny the results of the election. And to people on the left,
00:11:58
Speaker
have the duty to say to their extremes, no, you don't get to wrap yourself in helping the disadvantaged among us and then push policies that get crime out of control or that keep kids out of school for years.
00:12:15
Speaker
that may be two of the most damaging things that have happened in 20 years to the most disadvantaged communities among us. Why do you get to wrap yourself in social justice if you're pushing that?
Assertiveness Against Political Extremism
00:12:25
Speaker
Or if you're chanting slogans that come from sometimes literally Hamas, which is hardly a left-wing social justice organization for those who don't know the history. And so all this made me wonder, do moderates need sharper elbows?
00:12:45
Speaker
Can we have moral clarity about being intellectually serious is the way I would put it in your framework, right? If the issues that the extremes are wrapping themselves in and claiming the right to ownership of are so serious, then maybe it's time that the rest of us demand that they take those issues seriously.
00:13:07
Speaker
And if they don't, maybe it's time for the rest of us to say, no, you don't get to wrap yourself in that issue. But then on the other hand, anytime, you know, as somebody who like you came up in the more Ibu Patel, Monica Guzman tradition, you know, it's also, I'm from Canada, so it's kind of part of our culture, right? I also worry about a world where moderates are too intolerant, right? Is that just a world where we replace one type of cancel culture with another? Is that a world where we're too cautious in our thinking?
00:13:35
Speaker
because we're afraid of being branded extreme. Is that a world where we give people power to hog the microphone and then narcissistic and antisocial moderates hog the microphone just like narcissistic and antisocial extremists sometimes are hogging the microphone today? So I don't know, but hopefully you can tell that I'm really profoundly struggling with this. What do you think?
00:14:02
Speaker
Well, basically about 15 different topics of discussion came up on that. So I'll see which ones. We have 45 minutes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one thing I'll go back to the wicked problems framework, right? Like I talk and again, I do this with both sides, right?
00:14:19
Speaker
you know, whenever an issue is framed with only one value being relevant, you know, huge alarm bells go off, right? Whether we're kind of framing it in terms of freedom or liberty, like the Tea Party, or we're framing it in terms of equity from the left, right? Because that automatically frames things as, you know, my side has this value. And as Monica Guzman taught us, like, we love to define people that we disagree with by what they're against, right? And that just kind of creates something that, you know, sparks polarization and then undermines our ability to talk to each other.
00:14:49
Speaker
So that's certainly one of my concerns with moral clarity. One way I've been playing with, partly I think we're overusing the word toxic, and then partly I see it as useful. So the bottom of the polarity management map, when we overemphasize one side of the polarity, you can frame this, so toxic moral clarity is, when we're so sure we're right, we stop asking questions, we close our minds, we see things from a very simple lens.
00:15:17
Speaker
And that kind of speaks to some of your concerns of wrapping ourselves with a flag or so forth, right? That we frame things in such a narrow way tied to a positive value that we're so sure we're right. And then we're blind to criticize maybe those people that agree with us but are doing it in kind of negative ways. The other thing that really kind of came up, I know another tension I've played with is kind of like how open-minded should we be, right?
00:15:43
Speaker
And I use, you know, I use Caner's, you know, diamond decision making as kind of one of these key tools that, you know, really tough conversations or decisions need to, you know, first go through divergent thinking that we, you know, get lots of ideas and get past the usual suspects and kind of challenge assumptions. And this is one of the reasons free speech is so great, right?
00:16:02
Speaker
We have some intellectual humility there, right? Never kind of assume things are fixed. But then once we have a lot of ideas, we have to go through this tough groan zone where we're struggling with these tensions and different perspectives. But then eventually, if we're going to make decisions together, we have to have some convergent thinking. We have to kind of make some decisions. We have to use judgment and we have to discriminate. We have to say, hey, some arguments are better than others, right?
00:16:26
Speaker
Those three stages that I think conversations have to go through, or even individual decisions, each of those require a different style of communication. We need the open-mindedness of free speech, but where I see moderates being a little bit more intolerant is, at some point, we do have to make decisions. We can't just always agree to disagree.
00:16:47
Speaker
I like the National Governance Association's kind of new, you know, disagree better kind of program. We had the Governor of Colorado and Governor of Utah on campus kind of talking about this and, you know, I love that kind of stuff. But it also sometimes seems to have a little bit too much of an ethic of it's okay to agree to disagree.
00:17:06
Speaker
Well, democracy at some sense, especially local democracy in communities, we can't always agree to disagree. Sometimes we have to make decisions. We have to make some tough choices. We have to, for me that taps into kind of wisdom and judgment, which I don't think we talk about enough in universities anymore. So that's where I think a good process, you can't stay a moderate, you can't just say, I'm always balanced, right?
00:17:29
Speaker
But I think polarity management going back to where we're not just saying Well, I'll talk about this way. I'm playing with this idea I haven't figured it out quite yet of making a distinction between what I'd call like Spatial centrism or spatial moderate, which is just middle of the road, right? So wherever the extremes are I'm kind of in the middle and then more of a
00:17:52
Speaker
of a principled centrism, which I think brings in kind of Aristotle, right? Hey, it's the ideal mean between extremes. It's easy to define the negative extremes, but then you're struggling with that middle point. Sometimes that ideal mean might be further to one side or the other, right? So you're not just kind of this mushy middle that you're comfortable saying, you know, I'm better than the extremist, I'm in the middle. You have some tough conversation of exactly where that middle is.
00:18:18
Speaker
Yeah, this reminds me of actually a conversation I had at a conference with one of your CSU faculty colleagues, where I identify strongly as a political moderate, more of the second type, I think, than the first type. And your colleague asked me, what is a moderate? Is a moderate just somebody who flips a coin on every issue?
00:18:41
Speaker
I said, you know, no, like it doesn't mean that you're always down the middle, right? Sometimes your way, you know, for example, like any good Canadian, I want to take away everybody's guns, right? Like Americans, you have way too many guns. We should, we should buy some of them back. We should have, you know, rigorous permitting processes, et cetera, et cetera. You know, on the other side, I've become convinced.
00:19:02
Speaker
that the right is close to right on school choice, that we need some innovation in schools and probably charter schools and school choice are more useful in that to counterproductive. Just two examples. And there's many, many other issues where I fall on one side or the other. So it's interesting to think about that way.
00:19:21
Speaker
Let me frame it in the following way. I think of what you were talking about in terms of the tension between decisions and convergent thinking and divergent thinking in terms of what mathematicians would call Bayesian reasoning. Have you heard of that? Yeah. Yeah. So basically, and again, our listeners don't know any
00:19:42
Speaker
Well, our listeners are a smart group, but we're going to assume that they're not versed in all the jargon of academia. So for those who don't know, basically the Bayesian thinking is the idea that when you look at evidence, you don't start from neutral, and that's actually completely rational. You have some prior belief about how the world is, and then
00:20:08
Speaker
based on the strength of the new evidence you see, you update your prior belief. And the stronger your prior belief is compared to the evidence, the less the evidence is going to change your mind. And the stronger the strength of the evidence is compared to the strength of your prior belief, the more the evidence is going to change your mind.
00:20:26
Speaker
Now the problem with being too narrow-minded is if your prior belief is completely rigid, like if you're 100% sure that you understand something about the world, then you can literally prove mathematically that the value of new information to you is zero. So for example, when I talk to my students about this, I say, look, if this is you, you're literally wasting your money by being in school.
00:20:56
Speaker
On the other hand though,
00:20:59
Speaker
if you form your prior beliefs rationally, and not everybody does, in fact, everybody fails to in different situations, but if you form your prior beliefs rationally, and you just saw mountains and mountains of really strong evidence for a particular fact claim, like climate change is real, not that we need the Green New Deal necessarily, but just the basic fact that we're emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases,
00:21:28
Speaker
and that's warming the earth, right? I've seen so much evidence that suggests that that's true, that I think that rationally, my prior belief in climate change being real is really, really, really, really strong. And so if somebody sends me a paper that says it's not real, right, it's the sun or something, then I'm going to be, you know, skeptical, more skeptical of that paper than I would if somebody sent me a paper that said it's real,
00:21:58
Speaker
And I claim that that skepticism is rational. So that I think is kind of the intellectual domain, what you're getting at. I think the decisions is maybe a little bit different and why I think separating the values from the intellectual part can be useful. But on the other hand, sometimes we form our priors irrationally, right? So, you know, there's this famous study where they had like a fake scientific paper
00:22:24
Speaker
that said that coffee drinking causes breast cancer. And they showed it to a bunch of people and they asked them to rate how good the study was, how rigorous is it, how much do you trust it.
00:22:37
Speaker
And the group that disproportionately was skeptical of the study were female coffee drinkers, right? It's a classic demonstration of motivated reasoning, right? And it's not that they had seen, well, maybe in a sense they've seen that they've lived their lives drinking coffee and most cases haven't had breast cancer, right? So maybe there's some rational thinking underneath there. But in the main, the study's authors argued
00:23:04
Speaker
what's going on is motivated reasoning. You have a prior against that finding being true. And for the record, if you're a female coffee drinker, it's a made up study. So as far as I know, it's not true, just to be clear. But you have a prior belief when you're reading that study, that's really motivated by the fact that you really don't want it to be true. There's lots of things about the world, like
00:23:29
Speaker
Like I wish it wasn't true that, you know, people with narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders weren't disproportionately drawn to politics. I'm going to screw up the double negative there, but I believe it's the, I believe it's, it's a empirical fact. And that voters are disproportionately drawn to them.
00:23:47
Speaker
Yeah, right. Exactly. I believe both of those things are at least somewhat empirically supported. And the fact that I wish it wasn't true doesn't mean that it isn't. Another example that I have a whole course based on is there's people who argue that
00:24:01
Speaker
economic growth can't be environmentally sustainable in the long term. And then there's other people who argue that economic growth is way more central to all the gains in prosperity, and also to all the moral progress we've made as growth has made our societies less competitive, much more than we realize, and so we need growth. And I start this class by saying to my students, look,
00:24:25
Speaker
I don't know if either of these arguments is true, but I can tell you that they're not mutually exclusive. It's theoretically possible that they're both true, even though I would hate to live in the world where that's the case, because then we have a really big problem to solve, but we better prepare for it and think about it.
00:24:47
Speaker
So maybe let me come back to decisions your way to that about decisions, right? So you talked about the contrast between agree to disagree, like the, you know, governor Cox, governor polls approach. Um, and we need to make a decision. Are those two totally mutually exclusive? Like, you know, think about, think about decisions that you make with your spouse. Um,
00:25:16
Speaker
What else are you going to buy? This is just something that I'm working on right now. You have to make a decision, but it's still okay to have some people who don't agree with the decision that's made. The process is not that we agree on everything and make that decision, it's that we have some balance and some kind of democratic process that makes it such that
00:25:45
Speaker
one person's interest isn't always winning or the very least, even if the majority usually wins in a democracy, we at least protect minorities from having the rights trampled. Is that really incompatible with the idea that
00:26:04
Speaker
that we agree to disagree, and yet we make decisions. Yeah, I mean, I'll say like the the disagree better program or you know, even some of these things, what Braver Angels does and so forth. Those are all good things, right? You know, particularly because, you know,
00:26:20
Speaker
I personally feel polarization is hyperpartisanship is such a huge issue. I think it's going to be really impossible for us to deal with any real issue because once it gets polarized, the conversation kind of goes off. Facts don't matter and we make assumptions and so forth.
00:26:38
Speaker
So that the when I would kind of dialogue right these interactive things that are really primarily focused on depolarizing on helping us understand each other. Those are all really useful right because I do have these kind of two. I know kind of competing views of polarization.
00:26:55
Speaker
One, that polarization is our number one issue, and two, that most of it's not real. That it's manufactured, that it's exaggerated. So a good dialogic process doesn't have to lead to decisions. Just shifting the exaggerated conflict to the actual conflict does a lot of important work.
00:27:12
Speaker
Just shifting the person you disagree with from an enemy with bad values to, hey, someone I disagree with that has different perspectives but seems pretty reasonable, that's a huge move for democracy. Let me stop you there and ask you a follow-up question because I think you've touched on a point that feeds directly into this, do moderates need to be more intolerant question?
00:27:37
Speaker
You said that polarization is not real, right? And I agree with that. And just to unpack that a little bit, I'm trying to think wrong. It's exaggerated, but the perception of polarization is more important than the actual polarization. So it's real in a sense. Yeah, yeah. I shouldn't have said it's not real. But I think, correct me if I'm wrong, what you're describing is
00:27:59
Speaker
The fact that, you know, for one, the vast majority of people just agree on a lot of positions and also don't know that. And so that perception gap that we're getting, you know, those cool kind of surveys of, you know, how badly we, you know, understand the other side, right? We over exaggerate how many Republicans or how many Democrats believe something. Yeah. When we expose that, we realize, okay, wait, you know, we're, yeah, we're not as divided as we think.
00:28:24
Speaker
Okay, so this is where it gets back to what I'm wrestling with, right? One of the reasons we have that perception gap is that people who are extreme hog the microphone.
00:28:36
Speaker
And I think the political system rewards that. If I have to just win an election, negative ads work being the lesser of two evils work. So I think there's a lot of whether that's campaigns or just partisan media that feed off these conflict entrepreneurs that are getting rewarded by feeding these simple narratives and taking advantage of human nature.
00:29:05
Speaker
Outrage sells for sure. One of the things that I started this book project called How Polarization Will Destroy Itself where I've been digging into these incentives and my current working hypothesis that I'm trying to flesh out and test in this book is that those incentives are not actually as strong as we think once we take away the fact that the conflict entrepreneurs as you call them wrap themselves in these important issues.
00:29:33
Speaker
You know, take Bill Maher as an example, right? He, he has the, you know, biting rhetoric, right? Um, the ability to mock, uh, and some of the other things that you might, that I think are rewarded
00:29:53
Speaker
by the algorithm, right? But he wields them against extremists on both sides by pointing out often how counterproductive they are to their own stated goals.
00:30:06
Speaker
Right. So, so I guess in that example, I wonder if that, you know, is it, is it, are the algorithms rewarding extremists because they're extreme or because they're biting and clear, you know, they're, they're, they're speaking very clearly, um, in a way that's kind of riling people up, which again, I guess gets back to like, do we need more bill Mars? Do we need more moderates to rile people up? Well, and I guess two quick things. One is I should give credit that the, the,
00:30:34
Speaker
The concept of conflict entrepreneurs comes from Amanda Ripley, who's a journalist, a great article called Complicated the Narrative, and then that led to her book High Conflict. But the other thing I'll say is, you mentioned in the introduction that I run the Center for Public Deliberation, and I design these meetings. And really the heart of what we try to do in these meetings, bringing people together across perspectives to have better conversations about local issues, is to try to kind of flip that script that you just talked about, right?
00:31:03
Speaker
So, if someone at one of our meetings has a very simple solution to a complex problem, they kind of look silly. We're trying to change those incentives. We're trying to create an environment in a sense of someone who's kind of nuanced at struggling with these things, there's space for them to talk. But I think online and in our political system, generally, the incentives are the opposite. There's no place for someone often that has kind of more moderate views.
00:31:32
Speaker
But I think the good news of the center, I've been running it for 18 years.
00:31:37
Speaker
And I think we figured out for a grant, we've run about 500 meetings in the community around campus over these 18 years. And almost every single one of them went well. So that's the hopefulness of, hey, when you have a good process and all the bells and whistles we do to spark a good conversation. And every meeting, people come up to me afterwards saying, hey, we need to do this with this issue. So this is the hope, I think, is when you give people an alternative and they understand, no, you can have
00:32:05
Speaker
a real conversation about a tough issue with people you disagree with, I think they want it more, right? There's an appetite. So that's what we're trying to kind of grow together, certainly. And a lot of that is the power of face to face too, right? So for example, I won't name names, but I have had, you know, over the last couple of years, I've had the opportunity to hang out with, have dinner with quite a number of high profile people on both sides.
00:32:33
Speaker
and in the middle who at times have a very sharp edged polemical online persona, occasional dunkers, you might call them. And without exception, I have had very collegial, interesting, intellectually rich discussions
00:32:59
Speaker
sometimes including deep disagreements, because partly this is my own personality. I think it's fascinating to poke prominent people on their views in private to see where the threads go, right? But yeah, in every case, especially maybe in cases where there are deep disagreements, and again, this is people on both sides, I found that I've had really, really rich discussions that I think maybe is partly a
00:33:25
Speaker
product of conversational style. I'm asking them questions. I'm not trying to dunk on them. But also, I think it's just a face-to-face thing. You're just not going to interact with somebody face-to-face the way you are online or in a cable news show. But that doesn't fix the problem of cable news and online. Okay, here's another question.
00:33:49
Speaker
related to this sharp rebels thing, right? And that is – so suppose you're a moderate liberal, right? And the same would apply if you're a moderate conservative. But I think I see this – I see people more struggling with this who are moderate liberals. And that is how do you punch left without becoming right, right? So for example, when he first came on the scene, I watched Dave Rubin's podcast.
00:34:18
Speaker
For those of you who don't know, I believe his origin story is he was one of the young Turks. He identified himself as a liberal. And then in what you might call the first wave of wokeness around 2013, 2014, 2015, he became a disaffected liberal, started the Rubin Report show, which he still has. And initially, the tenor of it was, I'm a liberal who's punching left.
00:34:46
Speaker
And then over time, he became, you know, I think kind of a literal MAGA Trump supporter, right? The James Lindsay maybe had an, is another example of somebody who maybe had an even more extreme transformation. Candace Owens, maybe, you know, she was actually quite woke before she was a right wing provocateur. And it was, you know, disillusionment coming from her own brush with cancel culture, as far as I remember, that kind of pushed her to the right.
00:35:17
Speaker
And you know, the people who have kind of very publicly become sharp at what you might call sharp elbowed moderates who haven't then
00:35:27
Speaker
gone either in perception or reality or both completely to the other side are actually, I think, depressingly rare, right? So I think Bill Maher is maybe the best example I can think of. Constantine Kisson, I think he's a little bit center right would be my read on him, although he may disagree with that. I think he's like Bill Maher in the sense that he's been consistent. I haven't seen any evidence of him changing his personal views.
00:35:52
Speaker
But again, to some extent, maybe he's perceived as more conservative than he is because he's been very effective at punching left. And then obviously, the more extreme cases that I just mentioned, who definitely have gone to the right,
00:36:07
Speaker
And probably there's some examples of that on the other side. Again, I'm more familiar with the kind of disaffected liberal becoming conservative. And so some of that's perception – so why does that happen, right? My best guess is that some of it's perception, right, if you're always –
00:36:24
Speaker
You know, for example, my good friend and frequent collaborator, Roger Pilkey Jr., I think is a great example of somebody where it's mostly, if not entirely, perception. Every time I disagree with something Roger says, I'm usually on his right. He's definitely a liberal.
00:36:43
Speaker
But he's so known for punching left on what he sees as climate activists and scientists getting out over their skis to push an agenda that I think he's, I mean, I know that he's perceived by many in our climate community as a right winger. Again, even though I know as someone who knows him well,
00:37:07
Speaker
and knows that I'm a moderate who pretty much always disagrees with him from the right, that he's definitely a liberal and he's been actually pretty consistent if you sort of closely parse what he actually says on that. So partly his perception, partly I think though, where it becomes reality, I think comes to our pathological human psychology and groupishness, right? Like if you are a disaffected liberal who starts punching left, you're going to get a lot of friends on the right.
00:37:38
Speaker
You're going to get a lot of enemies on the left. A lot of unfriending. Yeah, a lot of unfriending. I've experienced some of this on a small scale. If you're in a predominantly left institution, particularly for your livelihood,
00:38:01
Speaker
That's kind of scary, right? The idea that I'm losing key friends in my current
00:38:08
Speaker
vocation and then you're winning friends and you could see that if you cultivate those new friends, then that can be very lucrative. Jordan Peterson famously said that he had monetized social justice warriors. So then if you kind of are embraced by the other side and you take comfort in that and you take solace in that as kind of a refuge from what you're getting from your own side, I could see how it would be easy
00:38:37
Speaker
cognitively to not want to alienate that other side, because then do you have anybody? And some of that I think is irrational. My experience has been, for example,
00:38:50
Speaker
I try my best to not be afraid to piss off any side. For example, there's a single author at the Heartland Institute, the same person who two years ago wrote an article basically calling me a brave truth teller for my work on how the hot climate scenarios were too hot.
00:39:08
Speaker
And then just recently wrote another article saying I was a democratic shill for my paper that estimated that climate change, basically people's opposition to climate change denial might have cost Trump the 2020 election. Right? My personal experience is that you win more friends than enemies.
00:39:27
Speaker
By at least try, you know, nobody's perfect. I'm sure I'm not perfect, but at least try to, you know, be trustworthy and act with integrity and go where the chase leads, you know, regardless of who it pisses off. And so far, my experience has been that, you know, even if people disagree with you or don't like something that you say, most people kind of
00:39:46
Speaker
trust you and treat you with respect because they at least see that you're not, nobody owns you, right? But certainly you get it from both sides and that can be scary. And it maybe is true that like, if I really piss off the left tomorrow, it's gonna be harder for me to become Jordan Peterson than it is for Jordan Peterson to become Jordan Peterson. But yeah, how do you think about that? Have they characterized that right? And kind of how do we break out of that?
00:40:13
Speaker
that incentive structure? Or is it just something that matters for people who want to be public intellectuals who aren't that big for action of the population? And so who cares? Shut up.
00:40:23
Speaker
No, I think like the easiest way I can explain the work that I try to do is someone who understands the social psychology and brain science or likes to think he does. So then I try to design processes that avoid triggering the worst of human nature and actually tap into the best. But the reality is the people that do the opposite, that know the social psychology and take advantage of the negative aspects of human, feed people the simple narratives,
00:40:51
Speaker
That's always gonna be much more lucrative, right? The market rewards that a lot more, right? They're getting paid a lot more. So that's kind of the conflict entrepreneurs versus the facilitators and the conveners. But I think, especially, we're seeing with the polls, people are so frustrated with the partisanship and that there is kind of some possibility there of kind of creating. And you're seeing in the last five or 10 years, right? So many of these organizations, Bridge USA and the Braver Angels
00:41:19
Speaker
starts with more and more organizations of people that are trying to figure out, okay, how do we exist here more and push back on that polarization in a sense.
00:41:31
Speaker
When I work with people thinking about depolarization, there's always this, what can an individual do? How do you think differently? How do you make sure you have a better media diet and how do you understand these things? But that's never going to be enough because if you're the reasonable person that struggles with attention in an environment that always rewards simple narratives, you're going to get run over.
00:41:57
Speaker
So one of the reasons my work focuses on local communities is how do you start building capacity in a local community that starts changing those incentives. So it's not just individual people behaving differently, but now you actually have structures and you have supports that starts kind of changing the conversation.
00:42:17
Speaker
In the good news, there's a lot of bad news on the social psychology and brain science, but the good news is the more we understand that, the less power it has, right? Once you really understand your brain wants a simple narrative, then when something seems very simple, you're like, maybe I'm missing something, right? And you start kind of asking questions. And so that's what we're hoping to kind of build more.
00:42:39
Speaker
The other piece to all this that I, you know, when I'm kind of figuring out my role, you know, mainly my role is to run an impartial organization, you know, the CBD is an impartial resource in Northern Colorado. I've written some on this, you know, come up with this concept called principled impartiality that tries to kind of bring out the tensions with that, right? That I need to be seen as impartial to do my work, to be this host for people to trust me. But I also have commitments to small D democracy, which has some values in there. And I have commitments to good information, right?
00:43:09
Speaker
If one side clearly has clear empirical information, the other side has kind of BS talking points, I don't wanna be neutral there, right? So I'm constantly negotiating those three tensions. And a lot of my work ultimately is pragmatic, right? That I'm gonna lean on the dialogue stuff and more the both sides, maybe even kind of the danger of falling into a false equivalency, because I think that's kind of the first necessary steps
00:43:37
Speaker
to kind of undo some of this polarization to kind of create some trust that then we can get to these later stages of the convergent thinking, right?
00:43:44
Speaker
So part of my assumption in my work is if we have better processes, and I'm maybe sometimes leaning too hard to the impartial side, is because that gets us to a point that then we can have the really tough discussions. And I have maybe a naive belief that when we get to the point of having really good discussions, hopefully the better arguments now have more power, right? This is one of,
00:44:13
Speaker
When I talk about wicked problems, I talk about shifting from the easy assumption that problems are caused by wicked people to putting the wickedness in the problem and see how that kind of changes conversation.
00:44:22
Speaker
And often when I'm getting my talk, I stop there and I say something like, I'm not saying that there's not wicked people, right? No, clearly there's much fewer wicked people than we think, right? Like half the country isn't evil, right? Correct. And then I also know from the social psychology that very few people would self identify as wicked. So pragmatically telling someone that you think they're wicked is unlikely to make them less wicked, right? It's just going to kind of undermine the conversation.
00:44:52
Speaker
So if there is an issue that truly is kind of oppressors, oppressing people, that kind of simple narrative that we hear a lot, I think they love the fact that we're all screaming at each other and facts don't matter. That makes it easier for them. So my goal again is how do we elevate the conversations? How do we figure out ways of talking to each other?
00:45:12
Speaker
which again leans a lot more to the dialogue in the kind of both sides and the intellectual humility, right, to get us to a point then that we can actually have the real discussions. You know, ultimately, we do need to make decisions together, but processes, an individual process to try to kind of undo some of the polarization and create some new relationships and build connections don't have to, right?
00:45:35
Speaker
So, my pushback on the disagree better or agreeing to disagree isn't those things aren't useful, right? It's those are necessary but not sufficient to the capacities we need in our communities or in our democratic communities eventually to kind of make this work better. Yeah, an interesting solution that I think applies both to the face-to-face dialogue domain and the public domain
00:46:00
Speaker
comes from this book called grandstanding that have you read it by Brandon Wurmke and Justin Tozzi. They were both on sabbatical here at CU recently. And basically they argue that you want to create incentives against grandstanding.
00:46:17
Speaker
But the way to do that is not to directly call out people and say, hey, you're grandstanding, right? What they say you should do instead is mock the publicly, mock the idea of grandstanding and the general behavior pattern of grandstanding such that people who engage in it
00:46:39
Speaker
have these pangs of internal shame without being kind of directly called out and then being offended and being defensive and all these things. Is that a way maybe that moderates can have sharper elbows in a way that's useful without reproducing cancel culture or reproducing some of the divisiveness that we've seen? In a sense, I mean, Bill Maher does sometimes mock specific people, but he also often
00:47:06
Speaker
Mach's general perspectives or points of view or patterns of behavior that he finds to be Mach worthy. What do you think about that? Yeah. I mean, one thing that pops in my head a little bit, right? So within the deliberative democracy world,
00:47:24
Speaker
there's a lot more talk now about kind of deliberative systems, right? And I like to think of the community I work with here in Northern Colorado as a deliberative system, the CBD being a particular kind of institution within that system. Part of this was a shift of, I used to see my work as running these individual meetings. Now I see myself as, what can I do to intervene to kind of improve this system, right? And part of the work on deliberative systems is
00:47:51
Speaker
We don't need everyone to be this reasonable person. Not everyone has to be deliberative, right? So we need activists or even going back to the initial moral clarity versus intellectual humility. I think we need some people that are probably too far on the moral clarity side, right? Because they can kind of help challenge the status quo and they can force us to ask some big questions. And so it's not that moral clarity is always bad. It's just when the dominant voices are the only voices we hear are moral,
00:48:20
Speaker
clarity, especially if they're just talking past each other, right? So that grandstanding, yeah, we need some people to grandstand, right? Because they're an important part of the overall kind of system of what we need to hear. We need strong activist voices. But ultimately, the problem is that they're often the dominant voices, right? And we don't have that process, like I talked about earlier, about negotiating tensions kind of between them.
00:48:48
Speaker
So I'm not sure if that gets any grandstanding, but... It does a little bit. So maybe let me drill in on two points of that racist. So the first is, I totally agree with you that we need a diversity of approaches, right? So even if it's true that we need more Bill Mars, I don't think we need fewer Monica Guzman's, right? So those are not...
00:49:12
Speaker
It's not like one approach or the other is mutually exclusive. Secondly, the thing you just brought up about, you know, we need some grandstanders, the way I think of that is in terms of what Jenny Sook-Gerson called megaphones and gavels. She wrote this article maybe 10-ish years ago called Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel. I think it was in Harvard Law Review. And basically her argument, this is kind of, maybe it was less than 10 years ago. It was kind of when the Me Too movement was in full force.
00:49:39
Speaker
And her argument was basically that, you know, there's a time for megaphone tactics, right? When you're trying to raise awareness about an issue that's not in the public consciousness, then there's an advantage to being simple, right? If you say, hey, there's this important thing, but it's a complicated, right? People turn off, especially if they're not already thinking about it. And so, you know, nuance is your enemy when you're a megaphone trying to raise awareness from issue.
00:50:06
Speaker
But when you are in charge, then you need complexity. And if you don't have complexity, then you're going to have injustice. And so she talks about examples of that in the case of some of the young men who ended up being railroaded and kicked out of college on poorly investigated charges of sexual misconduct, which in some cases turned out to be provably false. And she also, I think, pointed out that those men who were victim of that were disproportionately black men.
00:50:34
Speaker
partly probably because of internalized stereotypes that people have. And so the whole argument was basically that, look, feminism, you're in charge now, right? You weren't in charge in the 60s and 70s, but you're kind of in charge now, particularly in places like college campuses. And so it's time to trade the megaphone for the gavel. So I really like that distinction, but I think about it a little bit differently in the sense that I think
00:51:00
Speaker
It's pretty rare actually for the trade from the megaphone to the gavel to happen within people. I think it's often that there are some people who are really good at being megaphones and they shouldn't be president. And there are some people who are really good gavels and they're not gonna be the people that get some issue that we're not thinking about
00:51:28
Speaker
You know on on the map and so I wonder to what extent this maps on to polarization right like the and this maybe gets the second thing I wanted to raise, which was how do we make this work in universities right I think.
00:51:43
Speaker
I think one of the reasons we're so polarized and one of the reasons why we think we're even more polarized than we are, I think is that we have too many megaphone people in occupying gavel roles in society. And I think campus is a great example of that. And secondly, I think we need to decide where do you draw the line between acceptable boundary pushing
00:52:07
Speaker
and unacceptable boundary bushing megaphone behavior, right? The protests, the pro-Palestinian protests on campuses are a perfect example of this, right? Are you going to let people shout in the quad, free Palestine? You know, even if they sometimes chant things that are anti-Semitic, you know, free speech says you have to, right, if you're a public college. And in most cases, you know, I would support that unequivocally.
00:52:33
Speaker
But are you going to let people stop their peers from going to class if they think they're Zionists? I hope not, right? Are you going to let people vandalize public property? I hope not. Are you going to let people make explicit threats of violence against other people and explicitly call for genocide?
00:52:53
Speaker
Even though they were widely lampooned for it as a matter of First Amendment law, I'm pretty sure Claudine Gay and her peers were basically right in terms of what they said to Congress that even obscene things like calling for genocide can be protected speech under the First Amendment depending on the context. Even though we don't like it and that's the whole point of the First Amendment is it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't protect speech that we find repulsive.
00:53:22
Speaker
Do I have that right? How should we think about institutional neutrality and megaphones and gavels in academia? Let me rephrase it as some specific questions that people are asking. One is,
00:53:41
Speaker
Do we need to be more intentional about building political diversity among the faculty? Do we need to be less tolerant of academics and in some cases some would argue whole disciplines that have completely abandoned any pretense of intellectual rigor for
00:54:01
Speaker
megaphone, you know, sometimes fairly anti intellectual, sometimes fairly intolerant, you know, activism, right? Do we need to keep giving those disciplines faculty lines, some people would say no. And then how do we be, you know, should we be neutral as an institution? And what does that mean?
00:54:17
Speaker
For example, around issues like climate change. Does being institutionally neutral mean that we have to give equal voice to climate deniers? And again, when I say climate deniers, I mean people who literally deny that the greenhouse effect is happening and the planet is warming because of greenhouse gas emissions. I don't mean people who disagree with the less favorite climate policies, just to be clear. Yeah. How do you think about that?
00:54:40
Speaker
Yeah, no, again, lots of good stuff in there to dig into. I have one slide in the basic presentation I give quite a bit, right? Make this distinction between kind of traditional leadership and facilitative leadership. And, you know, traditional leadership is, you know, I got charisma, rah-rah, I got a strong opinion, I can rile people up. And that's still necessary in certain situations, you know, particularly kind of in a crisis situation.
00:55:03
Speaker
And facilitative leadership, you know, the argument I make is I think the superpower of 21st century leaders that we need is the ability to bring people together. Right. And so that's a kind of a different skill set in a way. But the problem is our political system tends to elect the
00:55:19
Speaker
the traditional leaders, but once they're elected, we need them to be a facilitator leader and it tends not to be the same people, right? They don't have that skill set. Though I think at the local level sometimes, right? I think the local level, you know, facilitator leaders, you know, the local level you have to actually, you know,
00:55:36
Speaker
solve problems, right? So you can't just kind of keep on getting elected and elected just because you kind of play on the side. So thinking differently about leadership and how do we kind of mix those. The other thing that popped in was you're talking through there, you know, I've taught social movement classes, social movement theory, you know, and traditionally the kind of cycle of social movements is they start off very kind of us versus them, very like, you know,
00:55:59
Speaker
good versus evil, simple frames. But then at some point they start getting power. People in power are listening to them, right? So that's when they normally split, right? So they split into the kind of purists, like, no, they're evil. And the pragmatists that are like, well, now they're listening to us, right? So we should work with them, right? So I think that's a similar to that. Famous MLK versus Malcolm X thing, right?
00:56:22
Speaker
Kind of like the, a little bit like the famous MLK versus Malcolm X kind of split that people often talk about. Yeah, yeah, you know, but I agree sometimes it's, it's, it's, it's a different skill set with people to be able to kind of shift. So to think about the role of universities, I write, I like Ron Daniels book. He's the president of Johns Hopkins wrote a book about universities or democracy. I think he does a nice job of kind of identifying some issues and
00:56:46
Speaker
you know, towards the end, he's like, you know, universities need to do a little bit more, I would kind of frame it as bridging work or deliberative work. He didn't use the word deliberative, right? But how do we kind of create more opportunities for kind of useful engagement across perspectives and to help equip our students with more of those kind of individual skills?
00:57:04
Speaker
And that's something I very much kind of believe that university needs to be a platform. It has to be a platform for a lot of megaphones, right? Not only legally because of free speech, but I think, no, ethically that we need people to have kind of strong opinions to challenge us. But if it's all just a whole bunch of individual speakers and
00:57:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's asking people to do too much, right? So how do we start innovating a university is doing what you're doing What I'm doing right of you know providing kind of useful debate which can be hard, right? That's not just the spectacles not just people talking past each other You know, I have this wooden Venn diagram I've been trying to kind of write an article on of debate dialogue and deliberation as these three kind of interactive communication technologies that
00:57:50
Speaker
They don't happen naturally, right? They need kind of support. They need a facilitator. They need.
00:57:55
Speaker
And they each kind of play a different role, right? So debate is this technology that helps us, you know, ideally, a good debate elevates good arguments and exposes bad arguments, which is pretty important for us to be able to deal with issues like dialectic. Yeah, yeah. And you know, dialogue is like I mentioned earlier is more about the, you know, bringing people together, creating some understanding and some relationships. You know, the problem with dialogue, from my perspective is,
00:58:20
Speaker
it tends to be non-judgmental, right? So dialogue is necessary, but not sufficient. For me, deliberation, and here's my bias. I run the Center for Public Deliberation. So deliberation, for me, when done well, captures the best of debate, the rigor, the notion of elevating good arguments, exposing bad ones, but also captures the best of dialogue in terms of creating a situation where people can listen to each other and have those aha moments where their caricatures get exposed.
00:58:49
Speaker
You know, so how do we, the downfall of deliberation, I should be fair, is it's really hard. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort, right? A good debate in a useful dialogue is at lower bar, right? But I think universities need to think about, okay, to what degree are we providing these three things, not only to our campus community, but to our broader community?
00:59:12
Speaker
Because like I said earlier, our communities need these facilitators, these conveners that can help us come together. And universities can play that role so well in our local communities as we kind of go through it. Well, and in fact, public universities, I would argue it's our job. Right, yeah. And for a man like CSU, that's part of our mission, is to kind of help people address their shared problems more productively.
00:59:40
Speaker
And even private universities get enormous sums of money from the government through things like grants and tax breaks and things. So I want to end with the topic of how can universities do this better, which obviously may be a little bit different from this broader thing about sharp eligible centrism, but maybe is related. So you talked about we need more opportunities for certainly students and faculty and probably staff to engage in deliberative dialogue.
01:00:08
Speaker
So imagine you're talking to a college president, right? So obviously one thing they can do is give more money to your program, right? Make it bigger, you know, make something like it mandatory for incoming freshmen. Is that enough? And if not, what else should we do to, you know, correct me if the following is wrong, I think kind of
01:00:34
Speaker
Underneath some of what we've been wrestling with is the assumption that universities are not totally doing the job of facilitating, of being this convener
01:00:46
Speaker
that they should be. Push back on that if I'm wrong claim. But if you agree with that, imagine that you're talking to the president of CSU. What would you tell her? Ironically, I was on a podcast with the president of CSU just on Monday. And luckily, she's the one that brought Ron Daniels to campus because she really liked his book.
01:01:11
Speaker
You know, CSU is, you know, trying to see supporting democracy, small d democracy as kind of one of their pillars. So there's some exciting times here, you know, we just had this big democracy, a thematic year in a democracy summit. So those kind of resources, I think, you know, hopefully CSU is kind of going that right way, right?
01:01:32
Speaker
You know, in my work, I started the center 18 years ago. I've written on this that I think every college university should have a center like this, right? But both in terms of the skills that the students learn, people don't know. I train students in my classes as facilitators. So they're the ones that are running the events in the community. At this point, we get hired by the city or the county or school districts or the university to kind of run these events.
01:01:54
Speaker
So I've been doing this for 20 years. I've seen it grow more and more universities are doing this work. So I think that chapter I mentioned, I think there's three broad narratives about universities, all of them somewhat false and all of them, I think, ultimately negative.
01:02:10
Speaker
One is the ivory tower that we're just disconnected and arguing about how many angels fit on a pen or whatever. The second one is more just glorified job training. It's all about getting a piece of paper. And then the third is the social justice warrior. We've been captured. We're trying to indoctrinate your kids.
01:02:32
Speaker
what I'm trying to do is kind of build this fourth narrative, which I think is a much more hopeful and pragmatic and useful one of the kind of wicked problems university, the university as kind of this platform. And for me, it takes on what I think are the two biggest challenges we're dealing with in democracy. One is the polarization that we've already talked about. And the second is just kind of this information kind of overload disorder, misinformation, disinformation, you know, our
01:02:59
Speaker
Our ability to create information and share information has completely exploded. Our ability to make sense of that and to shift from data to knowledge to eventually wisdom has not caught up, right? And that's where the debate part comes in. That's where the rigor, that's where the agreeing to disagree is not enough, right? So we need to take on both of those challenges. And I think universities are well situated to take on both of those challenges if that becomes kind of the focus of our work.
01:03:31
Speaker
So let me offer a provocation and feel free to respond to it positively or negatively or in a mixed way. And I'll previous this to say that, you know, as the whole premise of this episode is that I'm struggling with this, right? So wrestling with this. So I don't know if these are my final thoughts. Which is a wonderful thing, right? We need you to do that more, right? I'm struggling with this. Right. This is exactly what you're saying.
01:03:57
Speaker
This is the fourth, right, the fourth, the fourth narrative of universities you're describing. But I have spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, what would I say if I was talking to, you know, university leaders and on a few occasions, I've had opportunities to talk to university leaders, like you have. And here's kind of where I am now. So yes, absolutely, we need more programs like yours, probably at a larger scale, probably
01:04:22
Speaker
at least some form of it being mandatory for freshmen. So we all have a shared skill set for being rigorous thinkers, for disagreeing better, et cetera. But I don't think that goes far enough. I would add the following things to it. Number one, enforce the policies you already have written down.
01:04:46
Speaker
So I think one of the challenges with where universities have fallen trust, have lost trust recently is by enforcing policies that don't exist.
01:04:57
Speaker
For example, when people are being canceled for innocuous speech, I was once called into the office of a DEI dean and asked to apologize for saying in a public talk that I was invited to give by the chancellor that immigrants risk their lives to come to America. We should believe in ourselves, which is true.
01:05:17
Speaker
I refuse to apologize. Right. So, you know, we can stop enforcing rules that don't exist. We can start enforcing rules that do exist. Right. So there are lots of rules that were went on enforced on some with some of the more violent versions of the protests and counter protests on campuses recently.
01:05:37
Speaker
I would argue that in many campuses there are discrimination laws that are broken routinely and things like faculty hiring and pretty brazenly. Whereas I am skeptical and inherently cautious about the Chris Rufo approach of outside stakeholders coming in and blowing the place up, I think that that
01:06:05
Speaker
There are many more ways that could go badly than that could go well, right? But on the other hand, I absolutely think that outside forces, particularly in public universities, should be holding our feet to the fire to enforce policies we have already. And I think the fact that we often don't is a huge source of demoralization for some of our talent. Who wants to work in a place where you don't actually know what the rules are?
01:06:35
Speaker
Where you go to a training on your faculty orientation and say, hey, these are the rules. Here's what you can do. Here's what you can't do. And then on a day-to-day basis, it might be totally different. So enforce the rules. And I think in many cases, we need outside actors to make us enforce the rules and bring the hammer down on us when we don't. That's number one.
01:06:56
Speaker
Number two, again, where I think the Chris Rufo approach has more dangers than upsides of the elected government saying, we're going to drastically reallocate resources away from these ideological priorities and towards these ones. I think that's a very slippery slope. But on the other hand,
01:07:17
Speaker
I think that one of the things that protects universities against toxic polarization is that whereas on social media and cable news, the incentives maybe for simplistic thinking and outrage, I don't actually think
01:07:31
Speaker
it so much is the case in terms of our students. No parent wants to pay tens of thousands of dollars for their child to come back as a fire-breathing, simplistic-thinking demagogue. And they especially don't want them to come back and think that that's what they paid for them to learn. And on the flip side, if we say,
01:07:55
Speaker
If the university presidents say, look, we're going to throw a few thousand dollars at Martine, and we're going to have a bigger deliberative dialogue center, but then we're also going to throw a bunch of money at these very divisive, sometimes any intellectual megaphones on campus, then what are the overall market incentives telling us?
01:08:18
Speaker
Now again, that doesn't mean that Chris Rupo should come in and say, we're going to take away their money. But here's maybe kind of a middle ground, right? And that is, don't protect departments or disciplines from the market, right? So if a discipline or a department becomes what Jonathan Haidt becomes such a,
01:08:44
Speaker
ideological monoculture that they become what Jonathan Haidt calls structurally stupid, right? Where they're, you know, they're getting priors, not from evidence, they're, you know, enforcing kind of thought policing, they're, you know, trying to infringe on the rights of other other people on campus. You know, don't shut them down, like Chris Rufo would do, because that's a slippery slope, you know, for academic freedom. But if they
01:09:12
Speaker
Stop getting students sign up, which I predict they will. Don't save them. Don't give them faculty lines. Don't make people in other disciplines take their classes to prop them up. And if there are disciplines that the most extreme, I'm not going to name the university because this is something I heard secondhand, so in case I'm wrong on the facts. But I heard a story about
01:09:37
Speaker
a university that had a department, and I won't name the department, but for the record, it was not one of the departments that you would expect, right? So it wasn't, it didn't end in studies, right? It was like a typical, you know, long standing kind of discipline department.
01:09:53
Speaker
The new leader of the university decided that this department had become, you know, ossified. It had become an echo chamber. It wasn't producing high quality research at a good clip. And so the, I can't remember if it was the chancellor or the president or the dean, went to the department and said, look, here's what we think the problem is. We're not going to fire anybody, right? We tenure, we take tenure and academic freedom seriously.
01:10:23
Speaker
But here's what we're going to do. We need this discipline in our university. We're not getting rid of this discipline. And you can imagine how this would apply. Again, this was a very traditional discipline in this case. But you can imagine how it would apply to any discipline. For example,
01:10:38
Speaker
most people who think that, say you have an ethnic studies department that somebody says has become way too much of an echo chamber, the vast majority of people who would say that I think would not argue that we need to stop studying and trying to fix racial inequality. So imagine the same kind of distinction, but with a traditional discipline. So this university leader said, look, we want this discipline. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to build a new department in this discipline. We're going to invite some of you to come over.
01:11:09
Speaker
those of you that we think are doing good work, and we're not going to do anything to the rest of you, we're not going to fire you, but you're never getting another faculty line, you're never getting another retention, and we're going to invest all that instead in this new department.
01:11:23
Speaker
And again, I'm not naming the university or the department in case this story is wrong or is from a different – the institution was misnamed. But in the story that I heard, the new department ended up pretty quickly within like 20 years becoming one of the best in the country in that discipline.
01:11:43
Speaker
And so that's maybe I think the closest I've heard articulated to like an intermediate approach between like do nothing. I think it was like a spectrum, right? You know, you could do nothing and just kind of let it happen, you know, kind of you can
01:11:59
Speaker
Let the market keep shared governance, not interfere with anybody, but don't protect anybody from the market consequence of their decisions. You can do what I just described, which is kind of heavy-handed. And then kind of on the extreme, you can do what Chris Ruvo is doing at the new College of Florida and say, we're going to close this and that discipline in that department. OK, that was a long provocation. What do you think? What would you say if you were the president? Yeah.
01:12:29
Speaker
I mean, pardon me worries. I'm not sure I'm happy with letting the market decide what disciplines we have and where we hire and so forth, right? Because sometimes the more popular classes, are they popular for the right reasons or not and so forth, right? Right. And the job training thing, this gets back to like, is that just going to turn? Is everyone just going to be engineering and data science and then we lose humanities? I wouldn't argue for that. I agree. It's tricky.
01:12:55
Speaker
But I mean, thinking more broadly in terms of, okay, you know, what can universities do, you know, upper administration to kind of encourage this kind of work, right? So we already talked about some of them having the work that we do. Obviously, we're biased towards that. And you're seeing what we just had Robert Button come to campus as part of the democracy kind of
01:13:16
Speaker
Summit that we had, you know, he talked about these bonding and bridging groups and the importance of that, right? You know, a lot of my work is a we need more bridging groups And you know so sparking some that one of my friends here Elizabeth sink has just started a really call it cool interfaith kind of program right at the University of
01:13:33
Speaker
needs more resources, right? They started, and obviously with the situation in the Middle East kind of blowing up, they're seeing, hey, the value of having kind of people focused on that. I know y'all already have a BridgeUSA student group. I'm trying to kind of get one here as well, right? So how do we get more resources, whether they're extracurricular or curricular? The other thing I'll kind of add that we haven't talked about is I think sometimes the incentives of universities, particularly for faculty,
01:14:02
Speaker
you know, are publishing in your individual journals, right? And universities have always talked a good game about interdisciplinary and so forth, putting more to that, right? Because, you know, dealing with, helping our communities deal with tough issues, those are inherently going to be interdisciplinary.
01:14:18
Speaker
So how to create more of those structures that help people across disciplines. I think sometimes the narrow view is rewarded because you want to become an expert in this very specific thing. That's how you get published. And now there's so many journals and different areas that it allows you to do that.
01:14:37
Speaker
So really, there's one thing that we're playing with now with our new Vice President of Research of how do we maybe create some really cool incentives for the process people like me to work with some of the experts, right, to kind of come together to help our communities kind of take on these big challenges and create, you know, again, switching those incentive processes that help us kind of play this role a little bit more.
01:15:01
Speaker
Then thinking about, actually, Elizabeth Cinco, I just mentioned, she just got hired away from our department to go to the honors program. She's going to be teaching, developing a class, which is very much cutting across perspectives and skill sets every year to all our honor students. That's a positive move, I think, because it's really focusing on those bridging skills and those facilitative leadership skills that I think we need to make sure all our students get exposed to as they go through.
01:15:33
Speaker
Okay, so maybe to wrap up, let me ask you, and this is kind of asking you for a soundbite answer, but you're not going to want to give me, and that's fine. So take as much time as you want. I'm just going to put the question that we started with to you. Do moderates need to be more intolerant? No. So I would say,
01:15:55
Speaker
Yes, well, one distinction I'm starting to make in my head from this conversation, right, is because I don't know if I would consider my primary role is as this impartial facilitator, deliberative practitioner, and kind of creating processes. Now, generally, my processes are going to give more space to moderates, right? But I don't really see my own personal individual politics. Yeah, I'm
01:16:24
Speaker
I would call myself a principled centrist. I'm in the middle of some different issues. But that's not really the role I play, right? So I think there's this distinction between, hey, do we need more kind of moderates with sharp elbows, as you put it? And I also think we need more kind of facilitators. We need more people that their role is kind of being this convener, facilitator, and so forth.
01:16:46
Speaker
There's some overlap there, right? But I think those are two different kind of ways of thinking that I think universities should kind of encourage both in a sense. But from my kind of polarity management kind of framework, yeah, I think if
01:17:03
Speaker
the danger of overemphasizing intellectual humility or overemphasizing neutrality or impartiality from that practitioner perspective is problematic because you lose the ability to make some distinctions that I think are sometimes important to make.
01:17:20
Speaker
So being a moderate isn't saying, yeah, everyone's right. That's part of my pushback on over-glorifying open-mindedness sometimes. We need open-mindedness in the first part of a process, but eventually we may have to make decisions together. And from an open-minded perspective, we're saying, hey, everyone's position is just as good as everyone else's.
01:17:40
Speaker
that undermines our ability to make good decisions together. So that's where I think moderates sometimes have to have sharper elbows, but it's that Aristotelian kind of search for that ideal mean between extremes, which unfortunately is a moving target. It's not a simple kind of
01:18:00
Speaker
Add up both sides and divide by two to get in the middle, right? No, it's this hard process of yes, we need more balance. But where that balance is, is always going to be a tough thing. So I do think, so my argument for intellectual humility is I think we're too far, we need to recalibrate, right? And allow more intellectual humility. But one thing I like about polarity management is this recognition that you can always overcorrect, right?
01:18:26
Speaker
Like Barry Johnson argued that too often we see things as problems to solve rather than the polarities to manage, right? So it's not that, hey, we need to all be intellectual, intellectually humble versus having moral clarity. It's like, well, right now it's kind of the loudest voices are one side. So we need more intellectual humility with the recognition or the, you know, making sure we don't overcorrect that like, Hey, we're all, we're all completely humble. So then we,
01:18:54
Speaker
We don't let good information play its role. We don't let better arguments have hopefully more power in our communities than bad arguments. Without moving more to one side or the other in that polarity than you want, can we insist within academia
01:19:11
Speaker
when we hire people and promote people, et cetera, that they have to be intellectually serious. They have to be pragmatic. They have to be interested in chasing the evidence where it leads. If you're in a discipline that's oriented around a problem, which is fine, right? I'm in environmental studies. It's fine to have a discipline that's about solving a problem.
01:19:32
Speaker
But you have to care about the facts. You have to care about the details. You have to be open-minded enough to find, you know, not to say, oh, maybe climate change isn't real, right? But to seek out, you know, new evidence and maybe also intellectual seriousness requires being open-minded enough to talk to other serious scholars who disagree with you, including on moral questions.
01:19:57
Speaker
Can we insist on that, or have I gone too far in one story? It turns out a lot of people are signed like a humility statement as part of their application process. No. Please, please, no. Enough, you know, I hate communism, but we shouldn't have had any communist loyalty else, right? It's like the, so, you know, please, no, I don't want to have the, it's like, you know, the solution to the anti-Semitism on campuses is not just to have like a new Jewish affinity group, right? And a new Jewish DEI office.
01:20:26
Speaker
It's the same kind of thing. No, not a statement, but we do, in theory, through peer review and shared governance, hold ourselves on each other to standards, right? To standards of scholarship. Can we be more explicit and discerning about intellectual seriousness
01:20:53
Speaker
being part of that standard. You can still be a megaphone to a point and be intellectually serious. But I do think that the university, unlike in society as a whole, in the university, our job is to produce and disseminate knowledge. One of the things I always say when I interview
01:21:12
Speaker
grad students is, you know, what is the thing that you don't know that if you knew we'd be better able to solve the problem you care about? And if you don't have an answer to that, then don't come to grad school, right? If the thing that you need, if you think you think needs to be done is we just need to adopt this policy that I already know is the best, then universities, I don't actually think are the place to best advance that, right? You'll be much more effective at advancing that within an advocacy organization.
01:21:41
Speaker
So that's, I guess, in the sense where maybe I'm a little bit more explicit and willing to be on a little bit on one side of your polarity for universities and say, look, our job is not to solve all of society's problems. It's to be the intellectual engine of society. And to do that, we do need to insist on some intellectual standards, even if that
01:22:05
Speaker
is intentioned with other roles, other more megaphony roles that are useful in broader society. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this might open too much of a can of worms now. Yeah. Last word to you. Go. Well, one thing I'm playing with and this goes back to things universities can do.
01:22:21
Speaker
So I have been asked by a university to kind of help think through how do we introduce free speech to our new, incoming students and particularly during student orientation, the parents are there too, right? So I've just started that kind of process thinking through, you know, and part of this, I think I can do this somewhat quick, you know, there's this tension between kind of honoring freedom of speech, which partly is a legal obligation, right?
01:22:44
Speaker
I'm sometimes concerned universities over legalize it, right? Like the argument for free free speech sometimes becomes we have to write like no There's a good substantive argument for free speech that we sometimes will you know? I go back to John Stuart Mill with that certainly right but there's this tension between you know We have to honor free speech or we want to and you know We also want to be welcoming and inclusive and you know, not harm marginalized for you know, so it's primarily that tension and
01:23:10
Speaker
And what I've been trying to introduce to that as I engage that is exactly what you're talking about. But yeah, universities also care about rigor and kind of quality and excellence. And it's a false tension, just to make a quick point, right? No. Do you know what harms marginalized communities way more than offensive comments? Unrigorous thinking about their problems. Right, yeah. Or even- As I would argue we've seen.
01:23:34
Speaker
you know, one of the books I was reading lately, I don't have the author in my head, but I know people universally like it about free speech. I think it's from the, you know, makes the argument one of the problems with
01:23:46
Speaker
you know, free speech lately has seemed to be more kind of, you know, the supporters of free speech from the right, right? Whereas you go back to the sixties and seventies and anti-war and civil rights movement and so forth, you know, so people have lost that in a way, right? So they, they, they, they see that, I mean, there is a tension, but yeah, it's an exaggerated tension, right? Of seeing, you know, it's free speech versus in collusion, right? Uh, that there goes with, but, but you know, you add on to, we also want rigor. There's some interesting tensions long-term. I think there's a,
01:24:14
Speaker
you know, free speech and rigor goes together, right? Sometimes in the short term, we're letting people say some pretty dumb stuff, right? Like I would struggle, I wouldn't be happy if someone invited Dennis DeSouza to my campus, not because he's conservative, but because he's, you know, does really bad history, right? You know, so it more violates kind of a, but even when I talk about things like, you know, we need processes that elevate strong arguments and expose weak arguments.
01:24:40
Speaker
It's also the recognition that what's a strong argument and what's a weak argument is really complex. And we don't obviously want universities to be the arbitrators of what's true and what's not true. So that has its own kind of tensions within that. But maybe we do want them to be arbiters and what's rigorous and what's not. Maybe we do want them to be arbiters on what's rigorous and what's not though, in terms of the process of finding what we truth claims. Yeah.
01:25:10
Speaker
And I think we've lost that some, right? We don't talk about, or even like you mentioned that you see the purpose of universities as producing and disseminating kind of knowledge, right?
01:25:21
Speaker
going back to Jonathan Haidt, he had that interesting speech about the telos of the university, should it be social justice or truth? And that did what I think heterodox wanted to do, which has sparked a lot of conversation kind of back and forth, right? One of my favorite one responses to that was going to know maybe it should be more inquiry. I started writing one more of like, no,
01:25:41
Speaker
I think the purpose of university should be cultivating wisdom, which captures a lot of that truth, but I think there needs to be a broader conversation about what the purpose of university, and I don't think it has to be one,
Universities' Multiple Purposes
01:25:54
Speaker
right? So even going back to, it's okay if some people at universities that they see the purpose of university be social justice, right? That can't be the overarching, right? And I agree with some of the criticisms when you're focused too much on that.
01:26:10
Speaker
then that tension with truth kind of comes out. But I think universities are going to have multiple purposes. For me, the more we understand those multiple purposes and then recognize the tensions between them, that helps us have better conversations about what universities should be.
Conclusion and Podcast Details
01:26:26
Speaker
Well, lots of interesting threads to pull, but I'm going to honor my promise to give you the last word. And thank you for coming on the Free Mind podcast. For those of you who are in the Colorado, especially the Colorado State area, do check out Martine's work on deliberative dialogue. It's really important work. We definitely need more of it. Thank you very much. And we'll see you soon. Thank you. Free Mind podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder.
01:26:55
Speaker
You can email us feedback at freemind at colorado.edu or visit us online at colorado.edu slash center slash Benson. You can also find us on social media. Our Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts are all at Benson Center. Our Instagram is at TheBensonCenter and the Facebook is at Bruce D. Benson Center.